Trivia / Cody Rhodes

• Ascended Meme: The Smackdown after WrestleMania XL, Cody quotes the memetic line from his wife during their time in AEW: “Who told you it was open mic night, bitch?!”
• Breakup Breakout: In regards to Legacy, he has fared much better than Ted DiBiase Jr.. After the split Cody became Dashing, while Ted was given his father's gimmick, which didn't help him much. He then teamed with Cody again during Cody's disfigurement gimmick, only to grow tired of the "undashing" Cody's abuse, turn face and develop the DiBiase Posse gimmick, and it looked like he would avert this. Sadly, injuries in the middle of a push halted all this and he ended up leaving WWE after a year of not being used, eventually leaving the business for good in 2014. Cody, meanwhile, at least got two tag team title runs with his brother Goldust before calling it quits in 2016, and ever since he left WWE, his stock has only risen; winning the ROH World Championship, becoming an important player in Bullet Club, and eventually co-founding All Elite Wrestling in 2019, launching the highest-profile competitor to WWE since the folding of WCW. Pretty obvious who the breakout of the team was.
• Creator Backlash:
  • When he was granted his release by WWE, he admitted he had wanted to drop the Stardust gimmick up to six months beforehand, but writers ignored his pleas. It went to the point that he admitted that during the personal meeting he had with Vince McMahon before making his return to WWE one of his demands was that under no circumstances he would go back to the gimmick, to which Vince agreed.
  • He also regrets the moonsault from the cage he did on Wardlow, having only realised exactly how high the cage AEW had made was right before jumping off it, and having to work with a broken foot bone for the next few weeks.
  • In one interview, the issue of a common dream match among fans being Cody versus Goldust at WrestleMania was brought up, and the interviewer mentions that the closest there was to it was the Stardust vs. Goldust match at Fastlane 2015 (widely regarded as underwhelming and ending with what looked like a botched pin). Cody first reaction to it was to say "Terrible! Terrible! Godawful."
  • He's gone on to admit that his "Daddy Eats First" catchphrase/shirt that he promoted on the leadup to All In didn't work as well in execution as it did in his head.
  • Cody has said he regrets many things about his huge American flag neck tattoo: not checking the size (he'd apparently planned for it to be much smaller), getting it all over with in one sitting, and ultimately, getting it on his neck instead of another part of his body.
  • He would later state in an interview that his "US vs UK" angle with Anthony Ogogo didn't work out as well as he'd hoped; Originally he was set to go over to the UK during the angle, which would play into it, but when those plans were nixed the rivalry came off as jingoistic to some fans. He has also admitted that while he still stands by the content of the promo in some regards, he should have thought more about the optics of lecturing a black man about racism as a blue-eyed, (dyed) blonde-haired mostly-white man with an American flag neck tattoo in the shape of the lower 48 states.
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: In an interview on Talk Is Jericho following the passing of Brodie Lee, Cody admitted to Chris that his favourite of his own matches in AEW to that point hadn't been his matches with Dustin or Jericho or Darby Allin, but the match where Brodie had squashed him in 4 minutes for the TNT Championship, because he could feel he was doing the right thing for the company and for Brodie.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: The 'firing' angle that led to his and Goldust's return and subsequent WWE Tag Title reign started as a way to write Cody off TV temporarily so he could get married.
• Romance on the Set: Married to Brandi Runnels (nee Reed), who worked as an announcer as Eden Stiles on NXT.
• Star-Making Role: Looking at Cody's career on the independent circuit early on, it was... okay. He gets a push at Joey Matthews's promotion but that quickly stalls. Global Force Wrestling is interested too, but they prove equally inconsistent, and besides them, Cody's basically there to make the established champion look better. That is until a clip at New Japan's World Tag League shows Cody joining Bullet Club. Suddenly he's beating top tier wrestlers regularly, winning several title belts, getting interviewed by multiple magazines, has t-shirts in Hot Topic... amazing what a simple video package can do.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Before switching to Stardust, Cody was apparently pegged to play a new Heel character; the head of Rhodes Industries, in a not-so-suble Shout-Out to Iron Man to probably capitalize on the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, not to mention playing on his nerdy tendencies and love for Marvel. His wife would have taken the role of his secretary similar to Pepper Potts.
  • In an interview, Cody revealed that before he left WWE in 2016 (which was before the brand split) WWE had an interesting idea. Cody was going to be on both Raw and SmackDown Live. One show he would be Cody Rhodes. The other, he would've been Stardust.
  • WWE officials wanted Cody during his initial Stardust run to to bleach his hair blond so that he could look more like Goldust, but Cody rejected the idea. Ironically, Cody ended up bleaching his hair anyway during his run on the independent circuit.
  • Had Cody Rhodes chosen to re-sign with AEW rather than return to WWE, the plan was for him to (finally!) turn heel, with that storyline involving a match against Sting. Sting's first talking segment involving him speaking to Cody but somewhat dismissing him in favor of Darby Allin was intended to set up that possibility.
• Written-In Absence: Part of the reason for his TNT Championship loss to Brodie Lee. Out of kayfabe, Cody had to spend some time away from AEW to film the first season of the Go-Big Show, which he was a judge on. Taking such a brutal and decisive title loss gave him the handy excuse of being off TV to sell the impact of the beating he received. The following year saw him precede his exodus for the second season of the Go-Big Show by taking a similar decisive loss to Malakai Black.

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